The time has come to liberate yourself from your puffer jacket and be frivolous again

I miss frivolity. Does that make me a bad person? Maybe it does in your book. In which case, I’m sorry. But it’s true. I miss life with all its bells and whistles. I am bored with zipping up puffers and layering on neutrals, and dressing with stoic practicality. I miss shoulder-robing and lipgloss and animal print, and going out bare-legged because it looks better.

If you sympathise – even just a tiny bit, secretly – then my fashion prescription for me and for you, this week, is to find the most impractical coat in your wardrobe and wear it on as many occasions as you can get away with. The cardigan coat that is completely useless in the rain? Sky is clear, so perfect. Conceptual “layering pieces” that don’t have sleeves? Ideal with a puff-sleeved jumper. Flimsy dalmatian-print numbers that don’t keep you warm? Hiya!

Freedom is inching closer, and in that spirit I am liberating myself from my puffer jacket, simply because I’m bored with it. This winter has, after all, been 67 months long. There are a lot of other aspects of my current lifestyle I’m bored with, but most of them are not within my power to change. I’m stuck with my own cooking. I’m stuck with looking at my own face in meetings, unless I pull the old “camera off” technique, and let my voice boom out of a dark square like one of the Jedi elders in Star Wars. But, if the weather plays nice, there’s no reason why I can’t wear a new coat.

Not that this is a new coat. Shopping, funnily enough, is not something I particularly miss about fashion. I shopped this coat from my wardrobe, having bought it from Zara at least five years ago, maybe 10. (I am perplexed by that aspect of the fast-fashion narrative

which suggests high street clothes fall apart after a few weeks. So snooty and so entirely out of touch with reality. I have loads of high street clothes I’ve been wearing for decades.) But after the aforementioned 67 months in a puffer jacket, it feels borderline transgressive to wear an outfit that hasn’t been chosen purely to meet a set of logistical and meteorological conditions.

Most of life’s bells and whistles aren’t coming back just yet. But as spring picks up, clothes are an opportunity to make life feel a little lighter. Even a tiny bit frivolous. Indulge me?

• Jess wears blouse, £135, reiss.com; loafers, £75, dunelondon.com; her own coat and trousers. Styling: Melanie Wilkinson.

Hair and makeup: Sophie Higginson using Rouge Allure Ink Laque and Chanel Le Lift Lotion